Towards the end of last month our director, Glyn, attended Growth Summit hosted by The Property Academy which saw several expert figures from within the industry.When we caught up with Glyn regarding the summit he commented on how great it was to see experienced and established figures from the industry talking openly about buying, selling and growing business.
It was Peter Fuller’s talk on acquiring relationships, however, which really made an impact on Glyn. The director of residential lettings at Romans talked about the importance understanding that when you acquire a business, you acquire relationships. Even though you own the business and manage the properties for your landlords it is important to think about who really owns these relationships? Your company may change branding, direction or even owners, but often as long as your landlords can still speak to the agents and property managers who they have built a relationship with then, for them, nothing has changed.
It is clear that understanding the value of the relationships that are built between your agents and your landlords and tenants can be key to growing your business. Seeing your property managers as ‘relationship managers’ not just ‘minders and grinders’, for instance, can help change your approach to your clients.
Over the past 12 months at Pinnacle our focus has been on ‘making the time to talk’. Like many agents we have become very aware of the importance of maintaining strong, open and honest relationships with both our landlords and our tenants. Across our branches we have devoted our time in encouraging staff to ‘invest the time to talk’ to our applicants and landlords to ensure we are in a position to offer them a service which is personal and best suited to their needs. By introducing simple processes such as asking our applicants “what’s the reason for the move?” we have taken the first steps to building personal relationships with our customers. In addition to building new relationships with our potential customers we also work on maintaining lasting relationships with our existing clients. By offering our landlords the opportunity to state their maintenance preferences gives them flexibility to personalise their service. Giving our landlords the opportunity to communicate their preferences is one of the reasons Pinnacle won The Sunday Times Gold Award for Property Management 2015 and our on-going dedication to building relationships will hopefully help us achieve Gold again this year.
